Dec142016

Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, fall 2016 release includes many significant changes, with the major improvement bring the ‘hybrid support’, and let you connect to Dynamics 365 (on premises – need to authenticate with IFD) with Exchange Online, or Dynamics 365 (online) with Exchange server (on-premises).

Also, the new Office Add-ins for Exchange 2013, Exchange 2016, or Exchange Online, provides the ability to extend Office clients such as Word, Excel, and Outlook using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The Outlook Add-ins can also “display contextual information next to the Outlook item you’re viewing or composing,” writes the Office team.

In addition, for ffice Add-ins, Outlook 2013 or Outlook 2016, and Internet Explorer 11 or later must be installed with either for the following set as the default browser on Windows desktop “IE 11 or later, or latest version of Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.” And, on Mac, “Outlook for Mac and the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE11, or Microsoft Edge” is required.

You can also use Dynamics 365 App for Outlook by browsing to mobile version of Outlook on the web on iOS 8 (or later), Android 4.4 (KitKat or later), and Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Also, only support Dynamics 365 online is supported when connected to Exchange Online.

The Office Add-in support matrix based on your client is different, for example, “for composing email, if you want to track email before sending it, you need to have at least Exchange Server 2013 CU14,” microsoft explained. While Mobile Outlook on the web supports composing email, but “you can only track email (you can’t add templates, for example) since the mobile editor does not support HTML.”

Tracking contacts is supported only on Exchange Server 2016 CU3 and Outlook 2016 16.0.6741.1000 and up

Adding email templates, Knowledge Management articles, and sales literature is not supported in Mobile Outlook on the web.

Supported only on Outlook 2016 16.0.7426.1049 and up

Supported only on 16.0.6741.1000 and up

Relevance Search is now available in Dynamics 365 online, and brings a more Bing-like, global search experience to mission critical business applications powered by Azure Search!

So, how does it work? With Relevance Search enabled, “data is fully synced to search index and data changes begin to sync continuously, and when you search something, the search is executed against the Azure Search index. Results are returned with a match to any word in the search term, including inflectional forms of words, like “stream,” “streaming,” or “streamed”, in the base language of your Dynamics 365 application,” Microsoft explained. “No wildcards are required to search anywhere in the text.”

Some significant new capabilities in this release include:

Relevance Search is available in mobile clients.

Explore your results using Facets and Filters such as Global Facets, and Entity Specific Facets.

Search within Documents in Dynamics 365

Search records that have been shared to you.

Search in Option Sets and Lookups field on an entity!

Relevance Search Enable in Dynamics 365 Online

Update 12/15: Dynamics CRM Data Export has now been integrated with the Sales Management Solution Template for Dynamics 365 as a free add-on service, and so there’s no more scheduling as the “data now automatically replicated from Dynamics 365 as soon as it changes.”

With this new capability, customers can use the sales management solution template to create an enterprise-ready Power BI analytics solution on data that is replicated to their Azure SQL database in a fast, robust and scalable manner.

If you are not aware, “Data Export is a free add-on service made available as a Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution that adds the ability to replicate Dynamics 365 online data to a Microsoft Azure SQL Database store in a customer-owned Microsoft Azure subscription.”

Deepak Gupta is a IT & Web Consultant. He is the founder and CEO of diTii.com & DIT Technologies, where he's engaged in providing Technology Consultancy, Design and Development of Desktop, Web and Mobile applications using various tools and softwares. Sign-up for the Email for daily updates. Google+ Profile.